Symphony by accident

Is evolution an accident?Yes and no, sort of... but not really.It depends on how you want to use the word 'accident'.Any particular random mutation could be called an accident. Whether or not the environment selects for or against that particular mutation could be called an accident. Evolution as a whole could be called an accident, in that there is no direction or planning to it.But, that a particular evolved characteristic is working is no accident. The selective mechanism removes that accidental nature of the change.To say 'an eye developed accidentally' is incorrect. The reason these types of arguments are brought up is to ridicule the odds of something that complex happening totally randomly. But the selective pressure removes that random component thereby making it no longer an "accident".

Even if so, the ones we'd need to focus on are the ones with high selective pressure if we're determining how "accidental" gross change is.The accidentality comes up in the face of morphological differences, not from some slight genetic drifting.